Could AI Make Podcast Advertising Obsolete?
School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
Subscriptions May Replace Advertising Revenue
Dave Jackson considers payment mechanisms and subscriptions as alternatives if AI makes dynamically inserted podcast advertising easy to remove.
AI Can Now Delete Your Podcast Ads. Here's Your Plan B.
What if your listeners could tell an AI to cut every ad out of your podcast and get back a clean file a few minutes later? That's not a hypothetical anymore. Adam Curry, the co-inventor of podcasting, just did it on the Podcasting 2.0 show, and the episode he tested turned out to be roughly half ads. If any part of your income depends on advertising, this one's for you. I walk through what happened, why Bill Burr's "terrible" ad reads actually sold more product, the real math on what Captivate, Buzzsprout, Supercast, and Patreon take from your premium subscriptions, and the soul-crushing (but honest) numbers from my own paid newsletter. And at the end, I ask you a question about AI that has nothing to do with your podcast and everything to do with your life.
AI Just Stripped the Ads Out of a Podcast
On Podcasting 2.0, Adam Curry connected his AI tool to Podcast Index using something called Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a fancy way of saying "a way to plug AI into other systems." Then he asked it to grab the latest episode of Ed Zitron's Better Offline and strip out the ads at the beginning.
Eight minutes later, it was done. The raw file was 12 minutes and 36 seconds. The actual episode was 6 minutes and 38 seconds. The AI removed a 2 minute and 54 second pre-roll block, verified the new file started right on Ed's "hello," and then offered to trim the three minutes of ads at the end too.
His co-host Dave Jones said what we were all thinking: it's over for ads. And honestly, when half your content is ads, can you blame people for wanting them gone?
Adam's Real Point: Discoverability
The following week, Adam came back and said we were all missing the point. He's excited about discoverability. If an AI can go fetch an episode and clean it up, it can also go "find me a show about blank," which is basically building your own search engine. His bot even offered to go get the next episode.
(For the record, when someone says "there's no discoverability in podcasting," what they usually mean is "nobody's discovered my podcast." Word of mouth works just like an algorithm, and it doesn't change the rules every month.)
I also got pitched by a company that wanted me to promote their ad-cutting app. I'm not naming them. As much as I dislike bloated ad loads, if you're selling an advertiser on getting in front of thousands of people and a chunk of them never hear the ad, that starts to look like fraud.
Want People to Listen to Your Ads? Make Better Ads
A theme I heard during the business days at Podcast Movement: if you want people to hear your ads, make them better. Exhibit A is comedian Bill Burr, who sold out Madison Square Garden. Back in 2013, he did a now-famous read for Shari's Berries where he read the company's instructions out loud and roasted the copy. The company called and asked him to take it down. He didn't. People ordered the berries anyway, partly because he said he'd get in trouble, it turned out they were delicious, and sales went up. Younger brands figured out that people were actually listening to him.
The catch today: brand-safety robots now scan transcripts, and in a lot of cases "brand safe" means "boring (IMHO)." They don't always understand slang. Tell a bot "that's the bomb" and see what happens.
Programmatic Ads vs. Selling Your Own Stuff
Programmatic ads (the Geicos and Progressives that aren't host-read) pay somewhere between $1 and $7 per thousand downloads, depending on who you ask. That's why so many shows stuff their episodes full of them.
Only 8.6% of podcast listeners say they could tolerate a few more ads if it keeps a podcast free, according to The Podcast Study 2026.
Meanwhile, 54.8% already say podcasts carry too many ads. see more
I've always said the most profitable way to make money with your podcast is to sell your own product or service. If you buy my book, Profit from Your Podcast, I make about $12. At a $5 CPM, I'd need 2,400 downloads to make the same $12.
Which is easier: 2,400 downloads, or selling one book to an audience you're specifically trying to attract?
The PBS Method: Premium Podcasts and Crowdfunding
No product? Try the PBS method: give people a great show, then ask them to support it. Here's what the big premium podcast platforms take (in USD, including card processing):
- Captivate: 12% plus processing, about 14.9% + 30¢ per transaction
- Buzzsprout: a flat 15%, fees included
- Supercast: 59¢ per subscriber per month, plus about 3.6% + 30¢
- Patreon (standard plan): about 12% + 30¢
The best choice depends on your price. On a $5 monthly tier, Buzzsprout leaves you the most, about $4.25. At $10, Supercast pulls ahead because its per-subscriber fee is flat: you keep about $8.75, versus $8.50 at Buzzsprout and $8.21 at Captivate. We're talking pennies per person, but multiply that by a few hundred supporters and it adds up.
My Paid Newsletter: Here's the Soul-Crushing Part
My newsletter, Podcasting Observations, lives on Substack and costs $4 a month. It has 2,407 subscribers. Sounds impressive, right? Eight of them pay. That's 0.3%, a tenth of the 3% I usually tell people to expect. Annualized revenue is up 73%, from $227 to $393. (So again, it takes time).
I won't blink at $400. Thank you to everyone who supports it. But that's what I call a "garden hose in the pool," not a fire hose. And the newsletter still pays off as a lead magnet, because some of those readers join the School of Podcasting.
Chapo Trap House: The Long Game
Want to see what the fire hose looks like? Go to Graphtreon, use Advanced Filtering, and show only podcasts. Chapo Trap House has about 46,000 paying supporters averaging $4.21 a month, which works out to roughly $194,769 a month. The catch everyone skips: they started in May 2016. They release free episodes and paywalled ones, and they've had a decade to build. It's not "which one way should I make money with my podcast?" Do them all.
Affiliate Income and Donate Buttons
- Amazon affiliates: I've made $129 in 2026 from around 134 orders, roughly a dollar an order, mostly microphones. Set it up once with things your audience actually wants. Every so often someone buys a $2,000 TV with their mic.
- Watch Amazon's rules. You can get booted for saying something like "shop with my link, it supports the show." It happened to comedian Jay Mohr. I use Genius Link, which also shows me what people click (right now it's Tom Webster's The Audience Is Listening and Storyworthy).
- PodPage has an affiliate program, and it pays nicely.
- Donate buttons: I like Buy Me a Coffee because it makes recurring support easy. It may take a little more in fees, but it's simpler for the listener. PayPal, Buy Me a Coffee, Supercast, and Patreon all integrate with PodPage.
AI Saves You Time. Now What?
I've used Claude to teach me Claude. For my free Podcasting in Six Weeks class, I drop the transcript of my hour-long session into it with my brand colors and ask for a summary sheet of the main points plus every URL mentioned. It comes out gorgeous and saves me a lot of time. My buddy John of Boomer Bunker (and his new show Over 50 Overhaul) is having a blast with AI too.
So here's what I want you to slow down and think about. If you spend $20 a month on AI and it saves you time, what will you do with that time? The knee-jerk answer is "more social media, a newsletter, more podcast stuff." Before you go there, look at your life. More time with your spouse, your kids, your dog? Back to an old hobby? (For me, it's that losing weight is a lot harder now than in my 30s.) If your life is under major stress, it shows up in your podcast. I know this from experience. The better you are, the better your show can be.
Is This the End of Podcast Advertising?
I don't think so. Adam was tapping into something very geeky (MCP Connection into the Podcast Index), and we still have radio and newspapers. Changes like this take time. And with billions of dollars supposedly on the table, I don't see the advertising world just letting this happen. I expect them to fight back. But if all of your income comes from ads, it's time to work on a Plan B. 2027 is going to be a very interesting year in podcasting.
Podcasting in Six Weeks: Possibly the Last One
My free Podcasting in Six Weeks course starts in November and runs around the holidays, so you can have a show ready in January. We've been experimenting a lot at the School of Podcasting this year, and this may be the last time I run it. Get on the list at podcastinginsixweeks.com (the numeral or the spelled-out six both work, I bought both).
Ready to start now? Head to schoolofpodcasting.com and use the coupon code LISTENER for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription, backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. The website is hosted at PodPage.
Next week: editing. I sent a voicemail to the folks at Buzzcast (Kevin, Alban, and Jordan), got a little wordy, and they called me on it. They had a point. We'll use that clip to talk about editing, and why if it takes you three hours to edit an episode, something's wrong.
Websites Mentioned
- School of Podcasting (coupon code LISTENER): https://schoolofpodcasting.com
- PodPage: https://podpage.com
- Podcast Index: https://podcastindex.org
- Graphtreon: https://graphtreon.com
- Podcasting in Six Weeks (free course): https://podcastinginsixweeks.com
- Boomer Bunker (John): https://boomerbunker.com
- Bill Burr discusses ads with Tim Ferris Watch on YouTube
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